Category Archives: Movies

It’s not your 5 yr old son, it’s you

Posted on by
7

Parents, please: enough with the “we’re just giving kids what they want.” Children learn through play. Segregated toys are inhibiting kids’ brain development by severely limiting their experiences. Children’s brains have more plasticity than at any other time in life, that’s why they can learn languages rapidly. Once those synapses make connections or shut down, its harder for brains to grow later. Read more about all that here. And here. And here.

What can you do? Resist marketing. It’s messing with your kid’s brain. You are the parent. You’re the shopper, the one with the wallet. Buy wisely.

How?

Get your daughters out of the monochromatic world of pink. Or any monochromatic world. Your kid may resist. This may be a challenge for her because kids love routine. But, still, challenge your kid with toy choice the way you would with any other learning activity. Help them to branch out and encourage them to try new things. Get excited about the toy. Play with it with them. Most of all, they want your attention.

Schedule play dates with kids of the opposite sex. If your kid’s preschool tends to segregate by gender, or allows them to self-segregate, talk to teachers and the head of school about mixing it up. Kids learn when they move out of their comfort zone.

Read your sons books where the main characters are girls.

Show your sons and daughters animation where the main characters are female (Miyazaki is a great choice.) After we all see “Tintin” or “Lord of the Rings” or “Arthur Christmas” on the screen, the posters all over town, and then the video games that follow and the toys derived from the movies, all practically without females, it seems normal that there are so few girls represented everywhere except for the pink ghetto. The annihilation of girls passes us by unnoticed. Girls are half of the kid population, yet children’s movies today normalize an imaginary reality where females hardly exist at all. Then we all literally buy into it. How do you think that makes girls feel? What does it make kids think? What are kids learning about which gender is more important?

Let stores and toy companies know how you feel about their relentless drive to segment toys by gender in order to sell products. Write to the companies directly. Blog about them. Tell your friends about it on Facebook.

SPARK has just initiated the Toy Aisle Action Project.

We are SPARKing this movement armed with Post-It notes and cameras in the blue and pink aisles. (Seriously, some stores have actually have colored their toy aisles pink and blue! When will it end?) With your Post-Its, make a note using slogans like “Where My Girls At?” in the blue aisle, “Your Girl Needs Joe, too” on a GI Joe, “This Is An Option For Everybody” and “What About Dads?” on the baby dolls.

SPARK advises to use statistics:

women make up only 13% of architects (I wonder why LEGO?), 14% of active US military (Where is G.I. Jane?), and 4% of executive chefs — so, why are all the kitchen gadgets pink when so many chefs are men?

I’ve thought about these kinds of stats a lot, and it comes down to this: if it’s low status, its assigned as “feminine” (cooking), and women dominate; but if its high status, all of a sudden it becomes “masculine” (being a chef) and men dominate. This bait and switch applies to the whole stereotype that boys like action while girls are more literary, good with words, and artsy. Unless we’re talking about the Pulitzer Prize or the latest exhibition at the MOMA, in which case, all of a sudden men rule the roost.

A department store in London, Hamley’s, decided to break out of the current trend and organize its toys by toy type instead of by the gender of the kid: arts and crafts, building toys, outdoor toys etc. Congrats to Hamley’s. Let’s hope the land of the free and the brave and its Targets and Walmarts learn something. In the meantime, parents need to shop carefully.

Still fuming about LEGO’s letter to Callie

Posted on by
11

OK, this sentence is still really bugging me:

We found that little girls really enjoyed having male and female minifigures in their sets, while the little boys would take the girl minifigure out before playing.

Why does LEGO think it’s OK for boys to throw the girl figs aside? And that girls are just thrilled to play with male figs? And that’s “natural?” Seriously. What kind of “researcher” observes that behavior and decides to create a toy that segregates genders even more dramatically? Don’t they get that that’s the problem? Or maybe they just don’t care about behavior that should be noted as curious because it fits easily into the whole idea and practice of segmenting the market in order to move products.

The conclusions LEGO came to, stereotyping girls even more extremely, sounds strikingly similar to Disney male exces claiming that girls will see movies about boys but boys won’t see movies about girls. Could that preference have anything to do with the ridiculous limited roles girls have in movies? Look at just the latest one, “The Lorax,” where the female character is the “romantic interest” of the main character, a male. This is an animated movie for kids. Romance? How do you think girls feel watching themselves, again and again, in smaller roles than boys? Less represented than males? Do you think, possibly, they might learn to put a lot of attention into what they look like, the way girls in movies and LEGO sets do, and what boys think about them, not because that’s “natural” but because that’s how they get any part at all in the show?

The boy casting the girl LEGO out of his pile is also echoed by Matt Lauer (a grown-up) and Today show hosts (also grown-ups) cracking up on TV over the idea that any parent would buy the Friends set for his son. Boys are cool, girls have cooties; Thank you Disney and LEGO for spreading this message to our little kids so vociferously with your movies and toys.

The Magowan Test for bias against girls in kids’ movies

Posted on by
10

Have you heard of the Bechdel Test created by Alison Bechdel in 1985 to check for sexism in movies? The Bechdel Test names the following three criteria for a movie: (1) it has to have at least two women in it, who (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man.

So here’s my version for kids’ movies: The criteria is it has to have (1) at least two females who are friends (2) who go on an adventure (3) and don’t wear revealing clothing

What do you think?

To clarify given your comments: Kiki and the mom figure are friends, Ponyo and the mom figure are friends as well.

Before you worry over the films with token “feisty” female characters that won’t make the cut, think about how easy it is for so many movies starring males to sail through this challenging criteria.

Are there imaginary worlds where sexism doesn’t exist?

Posted on by
11

I’m reading The Golden Compass and I absolutely love it. The main character is Lyra. She is fierce, smart, and brave. The villain is also female: Mrs. Coulter. She’s brilliant, beautiful, and wicked.

There are several indirect references to sexism in the book. When Lyra first meets Mrs. Coulter she is shocked that the woman is a scholar because female scholars are few and dowdy. Lyra notes many times that the male scholars get access to special rooms. Just like in the real world, right? We all know real life Oxford is sexist as hell. So what’s wrong with referencing that sexism in the story?

There are further parts of the story that make note of sexism. Only the male gyptians are allowed on the boat to recover the children. The female gyptians argue they should be included, not to battle, but because someone will need to be there to look after the children once they are rescued.

Of course Lyra, just a child, goes and battles and is the heroine of the story. But I’m wondering as I read, are there imaginary worlds where there is no sexism? I would love girls and boys to be exposed to this fantasy much more than they currently are. Before we can realize it, we’ve got to be able to imagine it. We get to that surprisingly little if at all.

Obviously, the challenge is that writers exist in real life sexist worlds so as Luce Irigaray wrote, even creating a “female imaginary” can be practically impossible to fantasize about. Though, honestly, it doesn’t seem like it should be that hard. Remember, battles are symbolic and metaphorical as are magical powers.

Just put a female front and center. Have some other females helping her out, they don’t have to be human, just female. That’s a start. Maybe the Oz series would fit? It had Glinda but a lot of makes around Dorothy. Alice in Wonderland? Same thing, but I think that would fit, at least the movie version with the White Queen. Is she in the book? There is the Red Queen, though she’s evil. I like evil female characters but I like good ones as well.  The only thing that bums me out about Tim Burton’s Alice, which I loved, was that the story was bookended with a wedding scene. Like so many modern day feminist heroines, Alice’s independent act is that she refuses to marry who she is supposed to. But why mention marriage at all?

Update: Commenters and  I agree on these: Oz, Wonderland, and Miyazaki’s imagination

Fantasy play crucial to healthy child development

Posted on by
4

More evidence is showing that fantasy play is crucial to the healthy brain development of children. The Christian Science Monitor reports:

In recent years, child development experts, parents, and scientists have been sounding an increasingly urgent alarm about the decreasing amount of time that children – and adults, for that matter – spend playing. A combination of social forces, from a No Child Left Behind focus on test scores to the push for children to get ahead with programmed extracurricular activities, leaves less time for the roughhousing, fantasizing, and pretend worlds advocates say are crucial for development.

So what happens when kids’ toys and media– major tools for fantasy play– increasingly focus on perpetuating limited gender stereotypes? Unlike in the past, TV series and movies today are often created around products in hope of moving merchandise. The Christian Science Monitor reports:

In the early 1980s, the federal government deregulated children’s advertising, allowing TV shows to essentially become half-hour-long advertisements for toys such as Power Rangers, My Little Ponies, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Levin says that’s when children’s play changed. They wanted specific toys, to use them in the specific way that the toys appeared on TV.

Even Lego’s Friends toys eagerly promises movies and games to accompany the sexist sets.

Read more here.

Girls Gone Missing From Kids Movies in 2012: ‘The Lorax’

Posted on by
4

The first kids’ movie posters of 2012 have descended on the Bay Area. “The Lorax” is now pictured on buses all over town.

I’ve seen this one as well, for a game derived from the movie, mostly by bus stops:

If you Google the poster, a few come up showing the token “feisty” female voiced by Taylor Swift, but I have yet to actually see this poster anywhere in San Francisco. Please let me know if you see a poster with the female character from ‘The Lorax’ anywhere in SF, or your city/ town and send me a photo.

The other main character in this movie besides the Lorax himself (played by Danny Devito) is Ted (played by Zac Efron) who goes on a quest to please the girl he’s infatuated with. Here’s the synopsis from imdb.com:

A 12-year-old boy searches for the one thing that will enable him to win the affection of the girl of his dreams. To find it he must discover the story of the Lorax, the grumpy yet charming creature who fights to protect his world.

Here’s the description on Wikipedia:

Taylor Swift has also been cast as Audrey, Ted’s romantic interest.

So this young, little kids get to go to the theater to see the boy playing the starring role; the girl in the supporting one as the love interest.

“The Lorax” also has an ugly woman joke in the preview. You can watch that here.

Click here to see Girls Gone Missing From Movie Posters in 2011.

Click here to see stats on the lack of girls in kids films from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media.

Oscar snubs Tintin, rewards foreign animation featuring females

Posted on by
10

This morning, Academy Award nominations were announced and “Adventures of Tintin” was left out of all categories except for best musical score. The snub is significant and surprising. Not only was “Tintin” directed by Hollywood darling Steven Spielberg, but it won the Golden Globe for best animated feature, usually a strong predictor for an Academy Award nomination if not the Oscar itself.

I couldn’t be more thrilled. I’ve written several posts about Herge, the creator of Tintin, and his disturbing thoughts about women. Herge believed that females had no place in Tintin’s imaginary world. What is so offensive and damaging about this sexism is that Hollywood would never allow an animated movie to be made in 2012 for kids where males were almost completely ignored. Yet, excluding females is just fine, even award-worthy. That’s because the male dominated cast of “Tintin” is consistent with most animated movies made for kids today. Leaving girls out of kids’ movies teaches children a horrible lesson: males are more important than females.

Not only did “Tintin” not get nominated for best animation but two foreign movies did. I haven’t seen either but both look as if they feature females in important roles.

“Chico and Rita” is summarized on imdb.com:

Chico is a young piano player with big dreams. Rita is a beautiful singer with an extraordinary voice. Music and romantic desire unites them, but their journey – in the tradition of the Latin ballad, the bolero – brings heartache and torment.

Just displaying a female so prominently on the poster is rare in animated films. This movie looks great, though I don’t think its for kids.

Here’s the synopsis for “A Cat in Paris” also from imdb.com:

Dino is a cat that leads a double life. By day, he lives with Zoe, a little girl whose mother, Jeanne, is a police officer. By night, he works with Nico, a burglar with a big heart. Zoe has plunged herself into silence following her father’s murder at the hands of gangster Costa. One day, Dino the cat brings Zoe a very valuable bracelet. Lucas, Jeanne’s second-in-command, notices this bracelet is part of a jewelery collection that has been stolen. One night, Zoe decides to follow Dino. On the way, she overhears some gangsters and discovers that her nanny is part of the gangsters’ team.

The cat in the title is a male and he is obviously the star of the film, but the little girl Zoe and her single police officer mom look great from the synopsis. I can’t wait to see this movie!

It’s clear that in order to award some diversity in animation, Oscar had to go outside of Hollywood and its male dominated world of kids cartoons. The other three Oscar nominations for animated features all go to films that star males and are titled for those males: Kung Fu Panda 2, Puss In Boots, and Rango.

This morning’s biggest winner scoring 11 nominations? “Hugo.” Another kids’ movie about a boy and titled for a boy.

But still, the “Tintin” snub is progress, right? Do you think Hollywood is reading Reel Girl? Starting to care about girls and the women they’ll become? Maybe not. Internet chatter suggests “Tintin” was left out because the Academy stipulates that motion-capture is not considered legitimate animation.

Reel Girl is now on Facebook. Click here to join.

New biography of Herge, NYT review mentions racism but not misogyny

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s what reviewer Cullen Murphy writes in today’s New York Times about the new book Herge, Son of Tintin by Benoit Peters:

Yet Peeters squarely faces two issues that hang over Hergé’s career: his resort to ethnic and racial stereotypes, mainly in the early stories, and his record of accommodation in German-occupied Belgium.

The issues can’t be avoided. In both word and picture, the depiction of Africans in “Tintin in the Congo” makes your jaw drop. (“It’s very nice of these blacks to bear us triumphantly to our hotel!”) The villainous financier in “The Shooting Star” has a hooked nose and has been given the name Blumenstein. Some of this work was later revised, imperfectly. And “Tintin in the Congo” has been gingerly treated by publishers and libraries. As for accommodation, Hergé published “Tintin” throughout the war in the collaborationist newspaper Le Soir. Peeters doesn’t excuse any of this (who would?), though he does try to put it in context. He observes that Hergé’s prejudices were those of his time and place, and notes that the cartoonist, as he matured, acquired a more enlightened sensibility. In “The Blue Lotus,” Chinese ideograms on signs in the background say things like “Abolish unfair treaties!” and “Down with imperialism!” (These were drawn by an influential assistant, a French-speaking native of Shanghai named Zhang Chong Ren.) Hergé was not in essence a political man, publishing in Le Soir because collaborationist newspapers were the only ones allowed to exist.

I haven’t read the book, and I hope Peeters explores Herge’s misogyny in it, but if he does, why would Cullen leave that out of his review? Why does Peeters “squarely face two issues” but not that one? If Herge’s sexism is indeed left out, why doesn’t the reviewer ask the reason for the omission? Are women as unimportant in this story to the reviewer and biographer as they were to Herge?

Read more about the creator of Tintin’s disturbing thought on women.

Female protag as rare as a rat who can cook

Posted on by
7

From the LA Times on Pixar’s first female protagonist in the history of the studio:

The film brought Pixar’s artists some new technical challenges — it took two years to achieve the precise degree of frizz in Merida’s hair, for instance. But “Brave’s” biggest mark of distinction is its female protagonist, a first for the animation studio behind the “Toy Story” and “Cars” movies.

Andrews said that Merida’s trail-blazing places “Brave” squarely in the Pixar storytelling canon.

“Pixar made the first old-person-centered animated film with ‘Up’ and the first rat-that-wants-to-be-a-chef film with ‘Ratatouille,'” Andrews said.”Pixar is not one to shy away from firsts.”

Wow, a female hero is as rare and remarkable as a rat who can cook.

She’s coming to a theater near you in June 2012. And she’s a Scot. I can’t wait!

Racist stereotypes get disclaimer, sexist ones still funny in kids cartoons

Posted on by
27

If you watch “Tom and Jerry” on DVD, before the cartoon begins, a disclaimer appears on the screen informing the viewer that while some episodes show racial stereotypes, they haven’t been censored because editing them out would be denying the racism ever happened which is worse than showing it. There is also an introduction by Whoopi Goldberg, which does not come on automatically but can be selected on the menu, essentially explaining the same thing.

The racism in “Tom and Jerry” is often shown when a character gets too close to an explosive, it goes off, and he turns up in blackface. Ha ha ha.

I know this because I have three daughters ages 2 – 8. A while ago we saw a “Tom and Jerry” episode on TV (no racism in that one.) They loved it, and I enjoyed it as well.  I liked the old fashioned, no bells and whistles animation, and I thought the classical music accompaniment along with the minimal dialogue was pretty cool. So I bought them a couple of DVDs full of cartoons.

But as we watched them together, not only was there some racism, but in all of the episodes, there were practically no female characters. If one did finally saunter onto the screen, she was so sexualized with her bow-red lips curling and spidery eyelashes incessantly batting as Tom and Jerry competed over her, I wanted to put my hands over my daughters’ eyes.

The non-sexualized female in Tom and Jerry? That would be the African-American one, Mammy Two-Shoes, most often shown headless with a pink ruffled apron snugly tied below her large breasts.

So why is there no disclaimer that appears on the screen about the female stereotypes in “Tom and Jerry?” Where is the introduction from Gloria Steinem explaining the historical relevance of this distorted gender stereotyping as a product of its time?

Unfortunately, the reason that there’s no disclaimer and no introduction is because sexist stereotypes in kids’ cartoons are just as accepted in 2012 as they were sixty years ago.  Sexist jokes in animation are, apparently, still hilarious. In fact, if you go to theater right now, you’ll be treated to two of them prominently featured in previews for upcoming films: one about how girls can’t fight in Madagascar 3 and an ugly woman joke in The Lorax.

Keep in mind that these movies are made for kids. Parents, do you really want to pay $10 a pop so your sons and daughters can be taught to laugh because girls supposedly can’t toss a pillow or aren’t skinny enough to be pretty?

What can you do about the rampant sexism in animation? That girls have basically gone missing from kids’ films? If you’re in a theater and you see one of these sexist jokes, start with calling out: NOT FUNNY. Do it for your kids.

Update: I’ve gotten a couple comments on SFGate about how in her foreward, Whoopi Goldberg refers to “women.”

It’s clear that the emphasis of her intro is race. She talks about the how “racial and ethnic differences were caricatured in the name of entertainment” and how people were made fun of “especially when it came to racial and ethnic groups.” She talks quite a bit about Mammy Two Shoes and the talent of the actress who voices her as well as the artist who drew her. She never refers to the sexualization of women and girls. I never get the impression that this is the kind of stereotyping that she is referring to. Because the racism in “Tom and Jerry” is worse, more blatant, and less accepted today, just as with Tintin, it gets called out while most of sexism is allowed to pass unnoticed. The same kind of sexism is rarely called out when it appears, as it often does, in animated films today. You can watch Goldberg’s intro here.